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Updated: June 21, 2025
When the wind lulled, the rain kept up the distraction, firing long volleys across the road, letting loose miniature cataracts from the hill-sides to brawl in the ditches, and beating down the heavy heads of wild oats on the levels; when the rain ceased for a moment the wind charged over the already defeated field, ruffled the gullies, scattered the spray from the roadside pines, and added insult to injury.
Sheep and goats browse in great numbers on the hill-sides; lower down the camel and buffalo feed; herds of horses roam half wild through the glades, and from the higher rocks the chamois looks boldly down on the inhabited realms below.
To Ta-kwan-hsien a few natural obstacles occur, although the road is always high up on the hill-sides. I crossed a miserable suspension bridge of two spans.
The heaps of mining refuse left by them in the valleys and along the hill-sides of North Derbyshire are still spoken of by the country people as "old man," or the "old man's work."
The houses crept up the base of the mountain, on the flank of which was a very large, long convent; two-storied, and painted scarlet, with a low black roof, and backed by a grove of dark junipers; while the hill-sides around were thickly studded with bushes of deep green rhododendron, scarlet berberry, and withered yellow rose.
A few huts, with sod walls or fences around the arable patches in the vicinity, were to be seen from time to time, but in general the country was very thinly populated. Flocks of sheep, and occasionally a few horses, grazed on the hill-sides. The great trouble of our lives in the neighborhood of these settlements was a little dog belonging to my guide.
In the name of him who delighted to say "My Father is greater than I," I will say that his miracles in bread and in wine were far less grand and less beautiful than the works of the Father they represented, in making the corn to grow in the valleys, and the grapes to drink the sunlight on the hill-sides of the world, with all their infinitudes of tender gradation and delicate mystery of birth.
Besides, the raspberries and blackberries, instead of being Doolittle Blackcaps, and Kittatinnies, and tied up to nice stakes in civilized little plantations, grew away off upon steep hill-sides, and in the edges of woods, by old logs, and around stumps; and it took at least three girls, and half a day, and a lunch-basket, and torn dresses, and such clambering, and such fun, to get them!
Our meat had to be eaten cold that is, frozen so solid that it had to be sawed, and then broken into convenient-sized lumps, which when first put into the mouth were like stones or cooked with moss gathered from the hill-sides and the snow beaten off with a stick.
'What are you thinking about? she asked. 'Signorina, my own, I was thinking whether those people I see on the hill-sides are as fond of coffee as I am. Vittoria sat up and tumbled questions out headlong, pressing her eyes and gathering her senses; she shook with a few convulsions, but shed no tears.
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